2012/11/29

More demonizing of the Tea Party in France, as Le Monde's Christian Salmon
mentions the dangers of the " 'no worries' right nourished with the
neo-conservative milk which flirts at times with the extremism of the
ultra-conservative Tea Party".

2012/11/27

The nation’s leading conservative newspaper ousted its top editor,
apparently hoping to ingratiate itself with the new government. A
cultural magazine brought in a new editor as well, opting for the
partner of a newly minted government minister.

The man she replaced took a job working for the new president. The springtime election of François Hollande,
the first French president from the left in 17 years, has brought about
a shuffling of the news media ranks, along with a host of potential
conflicts of interest.

Coverage has shifted too. Much of the news media, which largely lean
left, used to revel in denouncing Mr. Hollande’s predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, but now many journalists are feeling bereft of material because of the new president’s less dramatic governing style. Mr. Hollande
has proved confoundedly boring, they say, especially for news outlets
that sometimes cover the government as if nothing else matters, relying
on Paris politics to drive the news.

The line between politicians and the news media can be blurry in France,
where the fates of some journalists have long been hitched to those in
the government they pester or please. Mr. Sarkozy’s close ties to media
executives were considered something of a scandal, and his presidency
drew greater scrutiny to the incestuous relationships.

Mr. Hollande campaigned on a pledge to be “exemplary.” But in a country
where much of the Paris elite share a common background, attended the
same schools and go to the same parties, the traditional commingling of
journalists and politicians has endured. Daniel Carton, a former
reporter in France, blames the news media for not doing more to resist
such close ties.

“They know exactly what they need to do to avoid things getting out of
hand, but they won’t do it,” said Mr. Carton, an outspoken critic of
conflicts of interest in French journalism.

For decades, newspapers have relied heavily on state subsidies. The
public media, which account for perhaps half of mainstream television
and radio news, are still run by political appointees. Private media
outlets belong to companies or investors with demonstrated political
leanings or business connections to the state, undermining journalistic
impartiality.

Perhaps most striking this election cycle was the situation of Étienne Mougeotte, whose run as top editor at the rightist daily Le Figaro began and ended with the presidency of Mr. Sarkozy, the politician he championed and whom he was said to advise.

“We’re a newspaper of the center and the right, and we support Nicolas Sarkozy,” Mr. Mougeotte told the center-left Le Monde
last year. Under Mr. Mougeotte, Le Figaro was routinely criticized,
sometimes by its own reporters, as being a mouthpiece for the
government.

Mr. Hollande was said to have requested Mr. Mougeotte’s dismissal,
according to French media reports, and it came in July.

The publisher, Serge Dassault, is a senator from Mr. Sarkozy’s political party. But Mr. Dassault also heads a major military contractor, and there was widespread speculation that Mr. Mougeotte’s ouster was meant to put the Daussault group in good stead with the new president.

The news and culture magazine Les inRockuptibles
hired as its new top editor Audrey Pulvar, a radio and television
personality who was also the partner of Arnaud Montebourg, a government
minister and a prominent member of the Socialist Party.

Mr. Pulvar recently announced the end of her relationship with Mr.
Montebourg, but other such relationships have continued. Valérie
Trierweiler, Mr. Hollande’s current partner, began an affair with him
while reporting on him in the early 2000s, when he was a member of the
National Assembly. She grudgingly passed on a television news job this
fall and stayed at the magazine Paris Match as a critic.

Ms. Pulvar replaced David Kessler, who left to join Mr. Hollande as an adviser. Also, a legal affairs reporter at Europe 1 radio became the spokesman for the justice ministry. A political reporter at Les Échos, a leading French financial newspaper, joined the prime minister’s press office.

The public media have gone through postelection changes too. In October,
Mr. Hollande named a new director for the country’s international radio
and television news networks, RFI and France 24. He has pledged to reform the law that allowed him to make that appointment, but not until next year. The directors of Radio France and France Télévisions,
both appointed by Mr. Sarkozy, are expected to be replaced. The current
law, which makes the naming of public media chiefs a presidential
prerogative, was introduced by Mr. Sarkozy
in 2009. At the time, commentators called the measure a power grab. Mr.
Sarkozy said it was meant to remove a layer of “hypocrisy” from the
appointment process, which was controlled by a handpicked government
council.

The public media no longer serve as state propagandists, as they
effectively were until at least the late 1960s, but remain under
government “oversight,” said Jean-Marie Charon, a sociologist who
studies the news media.

Private publications are also beholden to the state, at least
financially. The government provided $1.5 billion in subsidies to them
last year.

Publications on the left are struggling to “find the right distance”
from the government, Mr. Charon said. The jubilation that dominated
political coverage last summer in Libération, Le Nouvel Observateur and
Le Monde has since given way to acrimony. Whichever way the French news
media lean, the departure of Mr. Sarkozy has left many outlets yearning
for more excitement.

“We had five years that were pretty exceptional; we had a man who was
the center of everything,” said Pierre Haski, co-founder and editor of
Rue89, a news Web site. “All of a sudden, we’ve gone from an overload to
an underload.”

“Sarkozy was good for sales,” Mr. Haski added. “Hollande is not good for sales.”

2012/11/26

As a member of France’s
team of anti-terrorism magistrates, he knows how hard — read impossible
— it is to penetrate the island’s tightknit criminal world, where
nationalism and banditry have blended into a combustible mix.

Mr. Thiel has been giving a lot of interviews recently, ever since a
well-known Corsican lawyer was shot and killed in his car Oct. 16. That
murder shocked France, coming as an unwanted reminder that Corsica, an
island of 305,000 people about 175 kilometers, or 110 miles, off the
French coast, is still under the thrall of an old legacy of vengeance
and death.

“You think if it’s small, it should be easy, but no,” said Mr. Thiel,
speaking Nov. 15 in his high-security office in the Palace of Justice in
Paris. “Everyone is connected. You can’t infiltrate, even if you have
the right accent and the right complexion.”

“The first question they’ll ask is which village are you from, and
that’s it,” Mr. Thiel said. “It’s over. There were two attempts to
infiltrate informants, and it didn’t take long for both to turn updead.”

On the morning of Nov. 15, the number of assassinations in Corsica this
year stood at 16. By that evening, it had ticked up to 17, with the
murder of Jacques Nacer, president of the local Chamber of Commerce and
Industry, shot and killed as he was closing up his men’s clothing shop
in Ajaccio, the island’s capital.

“These are assassinations,” Mr. Thiel said that morning. “We’re not
talking about some guy who kills his wife, or a wife who kills her
husband. These are settlement of scores among rival bands of organized
crime, or fratricidal struggles between nationalist groups.”

As Mr. Thiel likes to put it, Corsica is a mountain in the middle of the
sea, where isolated villages hold onto an ancient culture of vendetta
and resist the authority of the French government.

… Since mid-October, he has spoken out against the French government’s
lack of a consistent response to the violence in Corsica. He has cited a
series of amnesties in the 1980s that were followed by other halting
initiatives. He has criticized a flawed reform of intelligence-gathering
that he said had led to confusion, and few results.

It is no wonder that Corsican society today is paralyzed by fear, he
said. “How can a population rebel against this kind of violence when the
state apparatus is seen to be underperforming?”

That “code of silence” was vividly confirmed last week by France’s top
security official, Interior Minister Manuel Valls, who said on national
television that he had been stunned by the reticence of people on the
streets of Ajaccio. “I saw fear on their faces,” he said. “Some didn’t
dare talk to the minister of the interior.”

Crime in Corsica has evolved since 1998, when, in a stunning act of
political terrorism, France’s top government official in Corsica — the
prefect Claude Érignac — was gunned down. Mr. Thiel was the
investigating magistrate in the case, in which Yvan Colonna was
eventually convicted of the murder.

… Mr. Thiel’s last big Corsican case involved a number of young thugs,
arrested for a series of violent acts committed in 2007 and 2008,
including the tossing of a grenade into a police station.

He compared the defendants, who were convicted and sentenced last July,
to “children soldiers,” who turned to crime as much for the money and
the thrill as for the politics. “If you ask them, they’ll say they’re
doing it for Corsica, but they can’t say much beyond that,” he said.